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Re-establishing user perception norms: how long does it really take

Published: 28 August 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Motivation -- A study was undertaken within a software upgrade 'process' in a real life setting to identify issues that effect user acceptance of upgraded software in the workplace itself
Research Approach -- The study is part of an Action Research PhD project undertaken (and is ongoing) at a regional university in Australia. Part of the study involves development of a survey instrument used to record user response to introduced technology. No adequate survey instrument currently exists to guide organisations in the overall long-term assessment of acceptance or uptake of new technology. The paper presents results summarising survey presentation prior to, during and subsequent to the release of a software upgrade. The survey was also presented to users approximately one year after rollout, to better evaluate and interpret the participants' responses to the upgrade.
Findings/Design -- The initial results indicated that after three months of use (a commonly cited timeline for acceptance) the level of user satisfaction with the upgrade had not returned to the levels prior to the upgrade. Application of the survey after 12 months of system use further supports this position.
Research limitations/Implications -- The survey was supplied to a relatively small number of users (50) during the upgrade of a voluntary-use software application.
Originality Value -- System acceptance after the introduction of technology is a major concern for ICT. These findings provide what is, somewhat surprisingly, a very rare example of an attempt to quantify user perceptions of the impact of new technologies.
Take away message -- Minimise the user stress and loss of production that occurs with the introduction of new technology by supporting the users during the transition from one system to another.

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  1. Re-establishing user perception norms: how long does it really take

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ECCE '07: Proceedings of the 14th European conference on Cognitive ergonomics: invent! explore!
    August 2007
    334 pages
    ISBN:9781847998491
    DOI:10.1145/1362550
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • The British Computer Society
    • ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
    • SIGCHI: Specialist Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction of the ACM
    • Interactions, the Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Group of the BCS
    • Middlesex University, London, School of Computing Science
    • European Office of Aerospace Research and Development, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, United States Air Force Research Laboratory
    • EACE: European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics
    • Brunel University, West London, Department of Information Systems and Computing

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 28 August 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. action research
    2. functionality
    3. human-systems integration
    4. measures of performance
    5. system acceptance
    6. usability
    7. usefulness
    8. utility

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    ECCE07
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    ECCE07: European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2007
    August 28 - 31, 2007
    London, United Kingdom

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